"The development tools aren't available and research is only starting"
Hardly
Exactly what I was here to post. I mean, it's not like parallel computation is anything new. The concurrent programming lab at my university was the most important research division when I was back there in the early 90s. And they'd spent real cash on it, too... they had a transputer and everything.
I'm a final-year Computer Science student from the UK. During my studies, we covered 3 programming languages: C, C++ and Java.
During my CS studies at a UK university, we covered:
year 1: Pascal, Perl, Assembly language (MC68008 and NS32016) year 2: C, an ML-family functional language, Prolog, LISP (very briefly), SQL, FLEX, Bison year 3: C++, MATLAB, and an obscure language designed specifically for concurrent programming tasks with language-level support for semaphores, monitors, critical sections, synchronous message passing and asynchronous message passing
Most of us also learned Java, although this was not part of the official curriculum.
Are you really saying that the curriculum has been so condensed that you didn't touch any of this stuff?
So Microsoft have a patent on windows file system compatibility.
Of course, here in the EU (which is I believe where TomTom are based) there is a specific exception in patent law that enables you to ignore them for the purposes of ensuring compatibility between two different computer systems.
If you have a conspiracy large enough to include the election workers, couldn't they just open the box and change the papers?
The normal solution to this is to have the box locked with multiple locks, so that you need some number of people who are hopefully independent of each other (e.g. supporters of opposite sides in the election) to agree in order to open it.
Plus, the voter doesn't know how the system works. He doesn't even know if he's supposed to get a receipt.
If there's a box for voters to put their receipts into, most people will see it and realise what it's for.
This seems to be a classic case of WP:POINT: do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Whatever the merits of of linking/delinking wikipedia is not the appropriate venue. The sole reason for including something in wikipedia should be its encylopedic value.
Being able to see the content that was blocked increases the encyclopedic value because it allows the reader to decide for themselves whether or not blocking it was appropriate.
OK, the obnoxious advertising is more than a little annoying, but blacklisting them? Isn't that a little extreme?
hogtied.com
Well-known US BDSM site, complying with all relevant US laws. Almost certainly not illegal in Australia, although I'm not an expert.
encyclopediadramatica.com
OK, I know they're blacklisted from being linked to on Wikipedia (with good reason), but blocking the entire site for an entire country -- a little extreme for being obnoxious, isn't it?
biz
Huh?? Not sure how their interpretation of this list works, but with a badly written filter this would probably block all.biz domains. With a well-written one it would achieve precisely nothing.
myusenet.net
A usenet service provider.
churchofeuthanasia.org
A site that seems to be intended to make a political statement about population control, although doing it in a rather crude fashion.
satanservice.org
A site of information about self-identified satanic religious groups.
libchrist.com
From the site: "Promoting Positive Intimacy and Sexuality Including Responsible Nonmonogamy or Polyamory as a legitimate CHOICE for Christians and others."
18yopics.com
So, they're not even pretending to have underage models, yet they get blocked anyway? Presumably on the off-chance that some of their models are younger than they claim?
A list of hardcore movies, 99+% of which are totally legal (although, in most cases, copyright violations).
http://xfreehosting.com/
A hosting service provider's web site.
pornspaces.com
Another one.
http://pornstarpasswords.com/
A site with a collection of pictures of well-known US adult stars and a 18 USC 2257 compliance statement.
www.bowwowlyrics.cn
A site that, when it existed, probably contained lyrics and images relating to a vaguely-popular 80s New Wave pop group, and in a mirror of the Wikipedia/Scorpions debacle was probably blocked for hosting a copy of this album cover, which shows the naked back of the band's 15-year-old lead singer.
torrentfive.com
A generic bittorrent links site.
legal-models.info
A collection of non-pornographic images of children.
pussy.org
An average, run-of-the-mill hardcore porn site with US legal compliance statement.
sensualgetaway.com
A swingers' classified ads site.
piratetourism.com
"a full service travel agency, operating with the full license of the Ministry of Tourism and a member of the Association of Travel Agencies of Turkiye"
Who modded this funny? I wasn't trying to be funny - I was trying to point out that the list is secret, so GP doesn't know what's in it. Until this assertion is backed, I call bullshit.
I think he was talking about the Danish list, which is linked in the summary.
A $11k fine for breaking a secret law? How are you supposed to stay clear of it if you can't read the list of things you can't do?
"No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason." "What right did they have?" "Catch-22. [...] Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. [...] What does it mean, Catch-22? What is Catch-22?" "Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. "Didn't you even make them read it?" "They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to." "What law says they don't have to?" "Catch-22.
Not to mention that they almost certainly didn't steal her script. She seemed to think that she had a monopoly on the "chosen one" character archetype, along with positively-portrayed black characters, which of course no white scriptwriter would choose to do himself...
HE, by contrast, has had no real impact on anything, beyond pissing a lot of people off.
While I'm not personally a fan and find it trite and overdone, there's a general consensus of those in the know about such things that Dangerous Visions really did push the boundary of what was acceptable to publish a long way forward, and started a new trend in SF that is still having impact today. The fact that as a modern reader looking back we see nothing remarkable about it is, I'm told, a testament to just how much influence it had: nothing before was like it, but everything since has been.
What about the "general Slashdot wisdom [sic]" that there should be no intellectual property rights?"
I think the "limited IP rights" crowd outnumbers the "no IP rights" crowd by about 20-1. I'm all for a reduction of IP rights. I think 50 years from date of first publication is an adequate term for copyrights, and would support a scheme whereby they have to be renewed in order to stand after the first 25 years. I think patents should be limited in scope to the truly innovative; anything that can be described as simply an incremental improvement over a preexisting idea (e.g., doing this thing that could be done before, but with a computer!) should be ruled out totally. Trademarks should only apply to people attempting to compete directly with the holder. But I defintely support IP rights, and I think most other people here on/. would agree with most of the statements I just made.
In fact, that's the very way we, the "no intellectual property rights", propose to all those "but think of the artists!": instead of producing first, then forcing your terms on everybody once your never asked for work is made public, find some part to agree to some conditions, sign a contract, then start your job.
We've tried this system; that's how art was funded prior to the invention of copyright in, what, the 18th century? The problem with this system is that it encourages funding of a few big name artists while everyone else struggles to get noticed. The resulting body of artwork lacks diversity and tends not to challenge the status quo for fear of offending the people holding the purse strings.
I would say for every "freak" like this there must be a thousand+ that can code as well and are great to work with. [...] I have been doing SW dev for a living for about 15 years. Most of it large scale teams. I never saw anyone remotely close to this description and I have worked with some brilliant people.
I imagine the environment you work in has a selection bias away from this type of person. Put yourself in "Josh"'s shoes: do you want to work in a large team? Or by yourself? I'd guess the ideal position for Josh is one where he's the only programmer in the entire company.
Agreed; which is why this statement from TFS: "... could churn out code that saved the company millions" - is nonsense. It may look that way on the surface, but when accounting for all the code maintenance pains that inevitably follow, I've yet to see a single such "genius" that wasn't a net loss.
The folks who do extreme programming have a metaphor for this; they call it "technical debt", and point out that if you don't pay your debt down pretty quickly after running it up, you're going to get into trouble. Generating technical debt, they say, is an inevitable consequence of programming. But good programmers immediately clean up at least most of that debt as soon as they've finished implementing whatever they're working on.
The metaphor works. Managers are quite able to understand it, and it does seem to help in explaining what it is that's wrong with the kind of programmer we're talking about.
(They also have something else that might help in this situation: pair programming)
I think that 50 [cheap netbooks] would be pretty quick in a Beowolf cluster. (Well... an XP gaggle... but I digress)
Depends on your problem, but for most of them the network latency is a killer if you're trying to do it over wifi. My guess is the sweet spot for most use cases is more like 10 mid-end desktops with gigabit ethernet connected via a reasonably high end switch.
The myth of synchronized failure just doesn't exist out side of lightning strikes or similar power or fire related incidents.
Sorry to disagree, but I've had it happen to me (see my reply to your top level post), and I've talked to other people it has happened to. You've just been lucky so far. This does happen, a lot more than you think it does.
Two drives failing before you can replace the first failure is fairly unlikely.
Not really. A few years back I had both drives in my RAID1 fail within 4 hours of each other. They were both drives from the same batch that had the same firmware bug that caused the failure. This probably happens a lot more than the statistics lead you to believe it does.
When I hit that barrier on my old machines, I install Linux, which really just doesn't give a shit about BIOS limitations.
Funnily enough, neither does NT-family Windows. I used to have a few machines that have a BIOS limit at 32GB; my workaround with XP was, essentially, to lie to the BIOS about the size of the disks, telling it they had fewer cylinders than they really did. It then happily booted up a small partition at the start of the disk, and XP subsequently ignored the BIOS size information and was able to see the entire disk.
There's nothing in the streets Looks any different to me And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye And the parting on the left Is now parting on the right And the beards have all grown longer overnight
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution Take a bow for the new revolution Smile and grin at the change all around Pick up my guitar and play Just like yesterday Then I'll get on my knees and pray We don't get fooled again.
Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context.
This is both a pain and a godsend for foreign companies establishing products in China. Despite persistent rumours, the (official) Chinese translation of Coca Cola is not "bite the wax tadpole", but "makes pleasure in the mouth". The two phrases sound almost identical.
I wouldn't say to skip season 1, because there are some episodes in there that are important to watch. They didn't scrap the old storylines, they simply shifted focus a little. I'd suggest watching at least these episodes from S1:
* And The Sky Full Of Stars * Signs and Portents * A Voice in the Wilderness * Babylon Squared * The Quality of Mercy * Chrysalis
Some of these are due to them being good episodes, some because stuff that happens later won't make much sense without watching them.
Hand-picked top chefs who say that they don't need a large pointed knife clearly don't make sushi, cut up chickens, or dice their own garlic, let alone have the same economic concerns as the average "man in the street" - it's hard to see what it looks like in a normal kitchen from the top of an ivory tower.
Anyone who doesn't understand this point should watch Heston Blumenthal's TV series, "In Search of Perfection." Several times he basically stops what he's doing, backtracks, and says something like, "hold on, this piece of equipment costs £5,000; how are people at home going to do this?" It's very enlightening as to the way a top chef does stuff differently from how the rest of us do.
Slashdot Mirror
"The development tools aren't available and research is only starting"
Hardly
Exactly what I was here to post. I mean, it's not like parallel computation is anything new. The concurrent programming lab at my university was the most important research division when I was back there in the early 90s. And they'd spent real cash on it, too... they had a transputer and everything.
During my CS studies at a UK university, we covered:
year 1: Pascal, Perl, Assembly language (MC68008 and NS32016)
year 2: C, an ML-family functional language, Prolog, LISP (very briefly), SQL, FLEX, Bison
year 3: C++, MATLAB, and an obscure language designed specifically for concurrent programming tasks with language-level support for semaphores, monitors, critical sections, synchronous message passing and asynchronous message passing
Most of us also learned Java, although this was not part of the official curriculum.
Are you really saying that the curriculum has been so condensed that you didn't touch any of this stuff?
So Microsoft have a patent on windows file system compatibility.
Of course, here in the EU (which is I believe where TomTom are based) there is a specific exception in patent law that enables you to ignore them for the purposes of ensuring compatibility between two different computer systems.
This probably means nothing, though.
If you have a conspiracy large enough to include the election workers, couldn't they just open the box and change the papers?
The normal solution to this is to have the box locked with multiple locks, so that you need some number of people who are hopefully independent of each other (e.g. supporters of opposite sides in the election) to agree in order to open it.
Plus, the voter doesn't know how the system works. He doesn't even know if he's supposed to get a receipt.
If there's a box for voters to put their receipts into, most people will see it and realise what it's for.
This seems to be a classic case of WP:POINT: do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Whatever the merits of of linking/delinking wikipedia is not the appropriate venue. The sole reason for including something in wikipedia should be its encylopedic value.
Being able to see the content that was blocked increases the encyclopedic value because it allows the reader to decide for themselves whether or not blocking it was appropriate.
From the list:
www.goat.cx, 2girls1cup.com
So Australia's legislating for taste, then?
(lots of IP addresses including some with reputable hosting providers like Verio)
So hard luck if you got them after the original user whose content was blocked, then?
partypoker.com, www.pacificpoker.com, pokerroom.com, coralpoker.com
OK, the obnoxious advertising is more than a little annoying, but blacklisting them? Isn't that a little extreme?
hogtied.com
Well-known US BDSM site, complying with all relevant US laws. Almost certainly not illegal in Australia, although I'm not an expert.
encyclopediadramatica.com
OK, I know they're blacklisted from being linked to on Wikipedia (with good reason), but blocking the entire site for an entire country -- a little extreme for being obnoxious, isn't it?
biz
Huh?? Not sure how their interpretation of this list works, but with a badly written filter this would probably block all .biz domains. With a well-written one it would achieve precisely nothing.
myusenet.net
A usenet service provider.
churchofeuthanasia.org
A site that seems to be intended to make a political statement about population control, although doing it in a rather crude fashion.
satanservice.org
A site of information about self-identified satanic religious groups.
libchrist.com
From the site: "Promoting Positive Intimacy and Sexuality Including Responsible Nonmonogamy or Polyamory as a legitimate CHOICE for Christians and others."
18yopics.com
So, they're not even pretending to have underage models, yet they get blocked anyway? Presumably on the off-chance that some of their models are younger than they claim?
www.torrentspy.com/directory/1503/adult/videos+%2d+hardcore
A list of hardcore movies, 99+% of which are totally legal (although, in most cases, copyright violations).
http://xfreehosting.com/
A hosting service provider's web site.
pornspaces.com
Another one.
http://pornstarpasswords.com/
A site with a collection of pictures of well-known US adult stars and a 18 USC 2257 compliance statement.
www.bowwowlyrics.cn
A site that, when it existed, probably contained lyrics and images relating to a vaguely-popular 80s New Wave pop group, and in a mirror of the Wikipedia/Scorpions debacle was probably blocked for hosting a copy of this album cover, which shows the naked back of the band's 15-year-old lead singer.
torrentfive.com
A generic bittorrent links site.
legal-models.info
A collection of non-pornographic images of children.
pussy.org
An average, run-of-the-mill hardcore porn site with US legal compliance statement.
sensualgetaway.com
A swingers' classified ads site.
piratetourism.com
"a full service travel agency, operating with the full license of the Ministry of Tourism and a member of the Association of Travel Agencies of Turkiye"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cyde/Weird_pictures, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ewlyahoocom/WikiPr0n
Two collections of somewhat-risque pictures that appear in wikipedia articles. None of these images appear to constitute child pornography.
Who modded this funny? I wasn't trying to be funny - I was trying to point out that the list is secret, so GP doesn't know what's in it. Until this assertion is backed, I call bullshit.
I think he was talking about the Danish list, which is linked in the summary.
A $11k fine for breaking a secret law? How are you supposed to stay clear of it if you can't read the list of things you can't do?
"No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason."
"What right did they have?"
"Catch-22. [...] Catch-22 says they have a right to do
anything we can't stop them from doing. [...] What does it
mean, Catch-22? What is Catch-22?"
"Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping
about in anger and distress. "Didn't you even make them read
it?"
"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman
answered. "The law says they don't have to."
"What law says they don't have to?"
"Catch-22.
No, actually. Her case was thrown out.
Not to mention that they almost certainly didn't steal her script. She seemed to think that she had a monopoly on the "chosen one" character archetype, along with positively-portrayed black characters, which of course no white scriptwriter would choose to do himself...
HE, by contrast, has had no real impact on anything, beyond pissing a lot of people off.
While I'm not personally a fan and find it trite and overdone, there's a general consensus of those in the know about such things that Dangerous Visions really did push the boundary of what was acceptable to publish a long way forward, and started a new trend in SF that is still having impact today. The fact that as a modern reader looking back we see nothing remarkable about it is, I'm told, a testament to just how much influence it had: nothing before was like it, but everything since has been.
What about the "general Slashdot wisdom [sic]" that there should be no intellectual property rights?"
I think the "limited IP rights" crowd outnumbers the "no IP rights" crowd by about 20-1. I'm all for a reduction of IP rights. I think 50 years from date of first publication is an adequate term for copyrights, and would support a scheme whereby they have to be renewed in order to stand after the first 25 years. I think patents should be limited in scope to the truly innovative; anything that can be described as simply an incremental improvement over a preexisting idea (e.g., doing this thing that could be done before, but with a computer!) should be ruled out totally. Trademarks should only apply to people attempting to compete directly with the holder. But I defintely support IP rights, and I think most other people here on /. would agree with most of the statements I just made.
In fact, that's the very way we, the "no intellectual property rights", propose to all those "but think of the artists!": instead of producing first, then forcing your terms on everybody once your never asked for work is made public, find some part to agree to some conditions, sign a contract, then start your job.
We've tried this system; that's how art was funded prior to the invention of copyright in, what, the 18th century? The problem with this system is that it encourages funding of a few big name artists while everyone else struggles to get noticed. The resulting body of artwork lacks diversity and tends not to challenge the status quo for fear of offending the people holding the purse strings.
I would say for every "freak" like this there must be a thousand+ that can code as well and are great to work with. [...] I have been doing SW dev for a living for about 15 years. Most of it large scale teams. I never saw anyone remotely close to this description and I have worked with some brilliant people.
I imagine the environment you work in has a selection bias away from this type of person. Put yourself in "Josh"'s shoes: do you want to work in a large team? Or by yourself? I'd guess the ideal position for Josh is one where he's the only programmer in the entire company.
Agreed; which is why this statement from TFS: "... could churn out code that saved the company millions" - is nonsense. It may look that way on the surface, but when accounting for all the code maintenance pains that inevitably follow, I've yet to see a single such "genius" that wasn't a net loss.
The folks who do extreme programming have a metaphor for this; they call it "technical debt", and point out that if you don't pay your debt down pretty quickly after running it up, you're going to get into trouble. Generating technical debt, they say, is an inevitable consequence of programming. But good programmers immediately clean up at least most of that debt as soon as they've finished implementing whatever they're working on.
The metaphor works. Managers are quite able to understand it, and it does seem to help in explaining what it is that's wrong with the kind of programmer we're talking about.
(They also have something else that might help in this situation: pair programming)
I think that 50 [cheap netbooks] would be pretty quick in a Beowolf cluster. (Well... an XP gaggle... but I digress)
Depends on your problem, but for most of them the network latency is a killer if you're trying to do it over wifi. My guess is the sweet spot for most use cases is more like 10 mid-end desktops with gigabit ethernet connected via a reasonably high end switch.
The myth of synchronized failure just doesn't exist out side of lightning strikes or similar power or fire related incidents.
Sorry to disagree, but I've had it happen to me (see my reply to your top level post), and I've talked to other people it has happened to. You've just been lucky so far. This does happen, a lot more than you think it does.
Two drives failing before you can replace the first failure is fairly unlikely.
Not really. A few years back I had both drives in my RAID1 fail within 4 hours of each other. They were both drives from the same batch that had the same firmware bug that caused the failure. This probably happens a lot more than the statistics lead you to believe it does.
Consider that 5 years ago if you wanted that kind of computing power you had to [spend a lot more money]
Sure. Isn't Moore's Law great? For those who are buying in the future, rather than now, that is.
When I hit that barrier on my old machines, I install Linux, which really just doesn't give a shit about BIOS limitations.
Funnily enough, neither does NT-family Windows. I used to have a few machines that have a BIOS limit at 32GB; my workaround with XP was, essentially, to lie to the BIOS about the size of the disks, telling it they had fewer cylinders than they really did. It then happily booted up a small partition at the start of the disk, and XP subsequently ignored the BIOS size information and was able to see the entire disk.
More secrecy, not less. Don't let anybody read it. Imagine the following transaction.
Content company: Counselor, our rights are being violated. See to it that charges are brought.
Lawyer: I would be happy to do that, but the law is secret, so I don't know what to do.
"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."
"What law says they don't have to?"
"Catch-22."
There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again.
(basically: what were you expecting, a miracle?)
And the beep sound is exactly the same pronunciation of vagina in Chinese.
You have a dirty mind. Clearly it's talking about its Aunt.
Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context.
This is both a pain and a godsend for foreign companies establishing products in China. Despite persistent rumours, the (official) Chinese translation of Coca Cola is not "bite the wax tadpole", but "makes pleasure in the mouth". The two phrases sound almost identical.
Fcuk you.
I wouldn't say to skip season 1, because there are some episodes in there that are important to watch. They didn't scrap the old storylines, they simply shifted focus a little. I'd suggest watching at least these episodes from S1:
* And The Sky Full Of Stars
* Signs and Portents
* A Voice in the Wilderness
* Babylon Squared
* The Quality of Mercy
* Chrysalis
Some of these are due to them being good episodes, some because stuff that happens later won't make much sense without watching them.
Hand-picked top chefs who say that they don't need a large pointed knife clearly don't make sushi, cut up chickens, or dice their own garlic, let alone have the same economic concerns as the average "man in the street" - it's hard to see what it looks like in a normal kitchen from the top of an ivory tower.
Anyone who doesn't understand this point should watch Heston Blumenthal's TV series, "In Search of Perfection." Several times he basically stops what he's doing, backtracks, and says something like, "hold on, this piece of equipment costs £5,000; how are people at home going to do this?" It's very enlightening as to the way a top chef does stuff differently from how the rest of us do.